Vehicle ownership enables an individual to freely move from place to place. The price of such freedom includes legal and financial responsibilities. Unfortunately, drivers frequently operate vehicles without a valid license. Even more prevalent is the number of uninsured drivers. These factors contribute to health care costs and insurance premiums that are often prohibitive and thus financially preclude some individuals from owning and/or operating a car.
Vehicle theft also continues to be a problem, especially in concentrated urban areas. Although law enforcement authorities police the roads, they must rely on information from vehicle registration, licensing and renewal processes that are largely antiquated, thereby further hindering successful location of a missing vehicle. However, to assist in location of such missing vehicles, global positioning systems (GPS) are utilized to determine the location of a vehicle equipped with a global positioning device.
Unfortunately, upon discovering a stolen vehicle, officers must often participate in dangerous and potentially deadly high-speed chases to retrieve the vehicle. Recognizing the need to decrease or eliminate the number of high-speed chases, devices have been proposed to remotely disable a vehicle. Some such devices are installed in a vehicle and can be activated by appropriate authorities via radar or GPS to disable a vehicle, or can be remotely disabled through the use of analog and/or digital signals.
Instead of aiding in locating or disabling a stolen vehicle, other alternatives may perform as a means of theft prevention, wherein a user's driver's license includes prerecorded/precoded information regarding the authorized drivers of a particular vehicle and an on-board scanner that reads the license to enable or prohibit operation of the vehicle. Such “smart-card” technology limits a vehicle's use to authorized users only. Another type of smart-card, wherein information regarding a user's motor vehicle registration, driver's license, insurance, violations and/or vehicle inspection is accessible via scanning, could be helpful in the event of a police stop.
Each of the aforementioned devices are disadvantageous in view of the present invention because law enforcement officials are limited to gathering information on an individual or on the whereabouts of a vehicle, and to fully disabling a vehicle. Problem drivers such as, for exemplary purposes only, habitual speeders, probationers with limited mobility rights or others whose driving needs to be limited, monitored or otherwise controlled, but not completely prevented, are unable to be addressed with presently available devices.
Therefore, it is readily apparent that there is a need for a motor vehicle verification and control system that provides a remote activator capable of locating, monitoring and disabling an equipped vehicle, a receiver for analog, digital, broadband, satellite (i.e. GPS) and/or infrared signal technologies, a remote infrared target for disabling an equipped vehicle, an interactive license plate coupled with the remote infrared target for disabling means, and a license scanner that enables law enforcement authorities to regulate the speed, operation and traveling distance of a vehicle, thus preventing the above-discussed disadvantages.